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has talked about the ideal search engine knowing what you
want BEFORE you ask it, and Ballmer recently explained
Microsoft's multibillion dollar investment in Bing by saying that search research is the best
way to progress toward
artificial intelligence apps that help you DO things, not
just find things.

So both companies will probably be taking a very close look at
Clever Sense,
which launches its first iPhone app, a "personal concierge" called
Alfred
(formerly Seymour), today.

The app analyzes data from around the Web to figure out what you
will like, based on similarities with other people. It's similar
to the recommendation engines pioneered by Amazon -- "other people who bought X also
bought Y" -- or the Music Genome Project that eventually grew
into Pandora. Only it's applied to the real
world.

Clever Sense CEO Babak Pahlavan explains that the company grew
out of a research project into predictive algorithms that he was
working on at Stanford three years ago. The technology crawls the
Web looking for what users are saying about particular products,
and is able to categorize the results into between 200 and 400
attributes and sentiments for each one.

For instance, if somebody visits a coffee shop and posts on
Yelp "the cappuccino at X was awesome but salad
was crap," Clever Sense understands the words "awesome" and
"crap," and also notes that "cappuccino" is a high-interest word
for coffee shops.

This kind of analysis is performed millions of times per day.
When it launches, Alfred will have a database of more than
600,000 locations with between 200 and 400 attributes rated ON
EACH ONE. As you rate places, the app will get even more
accurate.

Alfred is focused on four categories -- bars, restaurants,
nightclubs, and coffee shops -- but Clever Sense plans to apply
its technology to other areas as well. Pahlvan explains that
Clever Sense could work very well with daily deals services like
Groupon, LivingSocial, or Google Offers -- instead of having merchants
throw deals out to the entire world, they could target them at
the users who would be most likely to buy.

At launch, the data is anonymous, but Alfred will feature
FacebookConnect integration so it can add social data
into its recommendations -- if it knows that a lot of your
friends are saying positive things about a particular bar, it
will weigh those recommendations more highly than statements from
random strangers.

The company has been running on an investment of about $1.6
million from angel
investors, but Pahlavan says the company is planning to raise
further rounds later this year. That's assuming it doesn't get
snapped up by a big company first.

Microsoft may have an inside shot --
Clever Sense is participating in the company's
BizSpark program, which gives free software and other aid to
startups -- but there are tons of other companies who should be
interested in the technology as well.